Some of the world's largest gas fields are found offshore in deep water (e.g. Ormen Lange) or in remote areas in the arctic (e.g Snøhvit and Shtockman). The usual way today to transport such unprocessed well fluids in a pipeline to a landside terminal is by adding monoetylene glycol (MEG) at the wellheads. This requires large infrastructure and cost in order to inject and regenerate MEG.
For very long pipelines (e.g. Shtockman), processing and drying (water) of the gas phase may be needed prior to subsea pipeline transportation, e.g. at a platform or a ship. A full gas drying, e.g. by a tri ethylene glycol (TEG) process, will here require significant space and weight.
One common way to solve water problems and to minimize the hydrate problems in the industry, is to use glycol injection/adsorption and regeneration in a closed glycol system. Though in widespread use, such systems are plagued with a host of recurring problems—most of which can be traced back to poor efficiency of the first-stage separator for a well fluid. Glycol processes are dependent on such separation being able to remove liquid hydrocarbons and water, solids, corrosion inhibitors, etc. That task is formidable, and results in high-cost equipment and high operating costs.
Though much focus is presently on gas fields and avoidance of their water problems, many of the same problems also appear in liquid-rich oil/condensate systems, where even small fractions of water in the total system may over time lead to significant problems or flow blockages. Water and its solidification is thus a general problem for modern oil and gas production systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,774,276 is used as one possible way to precipitate hydrate particles from the water in the system. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,774,276 water is made transportable in the pipeline with the hydrocarbon fluid to shore or to a central platform by converting water from the well fluids to hydrate.